But right now, she’s still trapped in her marriage to Ike. She’ll turn “Proud Mary” into a feminist rock anthem, representing all the unspeakable (and unspoken) violence she escapes and her determination to claim her own story. Tina already had a hit with “Proud Mary” in the Sixties, but in 1975 she has no idea what this song will mean to her in years to come. “There hasn’t been one of those around in 75 years!” Tina laughs, “I wear my eighties well!” This song is a fantasy, but all three of them traveled a long distance to get here, and the song is a generous river that carries them all. He’s never set foot on the bayou, but he’s gotten drafted, served his time, and worked his way back into the bar-band scene with Creedence Clearwater Revival. Neither of them really belongs on a steamboat, and neither did the guy who wrote the song, a white suburban kid from El Cerrito named John Fogerty. They’re laughing so hard as they dance, they’re practically falling over. “For someone well-known to talk about it helps.”īut here they are singing about rollin’ on the Mississippi River steamboats.
“I admire her survival as a battered wife,” Gloria Steinem told Rolling Stone in December 1984. Until she came along, the idiom “domestic violence” wasn’t even part of the language. Strange as it might seem today, she was the first star to talk aloud about domestic violence, to insist on it as part of the story, not to gloss over it or act coy. But people still underestimate the cultural importance of Turner telling that story. (Your mom is probably watching it on Lifetime right now.) The story turns on her escape from and triumph over her abusive marriage. Tina told her life story many times - in interviews, her books (the keeper is the 2019 memoir My Love Story), the Broadway musical Tina, the classic biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It. She couldn’t stand it when the press used the word “victim.” She had rocking to do. “Rhythm and blues to me has always been a bit of a downer,” she said. Neither she nor they wanted to recall her past. She had a new audience of Eighties fans, but hardly any of them knew any of the music she’d made with her ex-husband. “Even ‘Private Dancer’ - which seems to be about prostitution, but is also about wishes, hopes, and dreams - tells the story of women like me, caught up in sad situations, who somehow find a way to go on.” Her deep-country voice and his guitar always made a fearsome combo, in Fifties hits like “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” and “I Idolize You.” “The emotions I expressed were real because I lived those feelings,” she wrote in Rolling Stone in a 2019 essay. She was just a kid when she got famous, as half of Ike & Tina Turner. She was Anna Mae Bullock from Nutbush, Tennessee, daughter of sharecroppers, fighting her way in and out of the chitlin circuit. Turner, who died Wednesday at 83, carried the whole story of American music in her voice, because in so many ways, she was that story, but she was also a lot more. At that age, Tina Turner was just beginning. That’s how old Brandy, Usher, Adam Levine, Lance Bass, and John Legend are right now. She became a solo superstar when she was 44. Tina Turner didn’t just pull off the greatest comeback in music history - she invented the whole concept of the comeback as we know it.
0 kommentar(er)
